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[print edition page 76]

[print edition page 77]

NOTE ON THE TEXT

The manuscript of Turnbull’s “The Religion of the State” is incomplete. It consists of two four-leaf quires, the first lacking the first leaf. We have therefore supplied the title, which is taken from Turnbull’s letter to Lord Molesworth, 14 May 1723, above, p. 13. In the manuscript, pages 3–16 are paginated, whereas the “Postscript” is unpaginated. We have included continuous pagination in our transcription. Although there is no explicit indication of authorship in the manuscript and the handwriting differs from that found in Turnbull’s letters, there are good reasons to think that the manuscript is a version of the “Small Treatise” Turnbull mentions to Molesworth. First, the manuscript is part of a collection of papers (AUL MS 3107/1–9) discovered at the University of Aberdeen in 1982 that illustrates various phases of the Aberdeen Enlightenment. The provenance of the manuscript thus points to an author who, like Turnbull, worked in Aberdeen during the course of the eighteenth century. Secondly, internal evidence points to the likelihood that Turnbull wrote the manuscript, notably the stylistic mannerisms that Turnbull derived from the writings of Shaftesbury and the use of quotation marks to enclose loose paraphrases of material cited from other writings. Moreover, the author’s emphasis on the use of reason in religion and the stress placed on practical morality are consistent with the view of religion expounded in Turnbull’s writings and reflect the religious preoccupations found in his roughly contemporaneous letters to Toland and Molesworth. Furthermore, the references to “the principles & offices of honesty & vertue” and to “sociality” (pp. 82, 84) speak to Turnbull’s interest in Cicero and the natural law tradition. Last, the attack on the blending of scholastic metaphysics with theology and the view of pedagogy advanced in the manuscript also resonate with Turnbull’s vision of a liberal education. We therefore believe that the manuscript can be identified as a copy of Turnbull’s “Small Treatise.”